This is Planet Money from NPR.

If you happen to run a country in the 1990s and your economy was on the brink of collapse,

there seem to be this one person you'd call this one American economist, Jeffrey Sachs.

Jeff was a rising star at Harvard and he'd helped turn around countries like Bolivia and

Poland.

And in October of 1991, that call was coming from Moscow.

This was a bad crisis.

I know something about how to address the bad crises.

And so I was happy to try to help.

So Jeff flies from Boston to Moscow and he heads to the Kremlin.

And I was in the Kremlin meeting President Boris Yeltsin to talk about the economic crisis

in Russia.

For decades, Russia had been this laboratory for a radical social experiment, an experiment

that made free markets illegal and replaced them with an intricate system of central planning.

But for a lot of reasons, by late 1991, that system had almost completely broken down.

Russia was now in this sort of awkward situation where it had two governments, the crumbling

Soviet government and the new democracy headed by Yeltsin.

And Yeltsin and his new team of radical economists decided they could use some help.

So Jeffrey Sachs heads through the Kremlin security gates, passed the statues of Marx

and Lenin and he sits down at this table with other aghete economists, in walks a beaming

Boris Yeltsin.

And he walked across the room and said, gentlemen, I just got confirmation from the heads of

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